A contradiction in terms?

If a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family… for this is pleasing to God. 1 Timothy 5:4

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:26-27

In my daily paper the other day there was an obituary column of one of the most famous writers of her generation, a woman of very humble origins who worked her way up to become massively successful (not to mention extremely rich) as a novelist. What specially caught my attention was the way she described her attitude to what we might call “spiritual matters”: “I’ve kept my faith”, she said, “but I’m not religious”.

That’s a statement to juggle with! You might think it’s a flat contradiction in terms – to have “faith”, surely, is exactly what it means to be “religious”? Or, putting it the other way round, not being “religious” means precisely not having “faith”? What could that writer have meant?

The confusion arises from putting together two quite common words, faith and religion, which are both as slippery as eels, often meaning just whatever the person speaking happens to mean by them.

Personally, I hate being described as religious. I used to go to a barber shop where the staff entertained themselves by trying to solve that day’s crossword as they clipped our scalps. I managed to come up with an answer or two over the months, from which they got into the habit of reserving the “religious” clues for me… “Oh, you’re religious, aren’t you? You might know this…”. To which I wanted to reply, “Er, well, actually, I certainly seek to follow Jesus, but I wouldn’t call myself religious…” But I didn’t, of course, in case I might come across as some sort of self-righteous crank.

It's interesting that the Bible uses the word religion only sparingly. I’ve just looked up the KJV and NIV versions of the New Testament, and the word is used only a dozen or so times (though something depends on the translation of various Greek words), and even then not always in very complimentary ways. Unfortunately there isn’t always a usable alternative for us today, but it still makes me squirm. I feel like shouting “Death to all religion!”

But what about “faith”? Ah, that’s a very different matter. It can of course mean “a body of doctrine”, a summary of what particular religious people might believe – as in “the Muslim faith” or “the Christian faith”. I’m much more comfortable with that.

But by far the most precious meaning, surely, is “trust”. This simple but beautiful word conjures up the idea of relationship. The deepest meaning is to do with people; it’s about putting our confidence in another person, a flesh and blood human being. And the wonder of Christianity is that the greatest “person” who exists, God himself, invites us to put our trust in him.

To this we might say “But God himself is not what you have just said, a flesh and blood person. He is spirit!” This is true, certainly. But perhaps the greatest claim of Christianity is that this eternal, holy God “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14) so that we can know him personally – and trust him. Jesus is the human embodiment of God, and he teaches us to speak to our God as “Father”. Could there be a warmer, more intimate word?

So what did that writer mean when she said “I have kept my faith, but I am not religious”? We can’t be sure, of course, and it’s not for me to judge, but I suspect something like this: “I still regard myself as a Christian, but I don’t go to church”. (Others sometimes say a very similar thing: “I believe in a spiritual reality, but I have no time for organised religion”.)

The sadness of this is that it results in the worst of all worlds. It’s like saying: “I want the comfort and security of believing in God, but I don’t want the hassle or sacrifice of going to any trouble that that might entail. I don’t want the inconvenience, for example, of getting involved in services of worship, especially if they seem a bit dull or require spending valuable time with people I don’t particularly like. I want faith on my own terms, to be practiced at my own convenience, probably in solitude and perhaps along with a cup of coffee or a glass of something”.

Is that a fair description of the “faith” of such a person? If so, surely they have missed the whole point of Christianity, a faith that involves nothing less, according to Jesus, than “taking up our cross to follow him”, of entering into a deep, warm relationship with Almighty God himself, of learning to love as brothers and sisters people we find it hard to like, and of being re-moulded as a human being into the man or woman I was always intended by God to be.

The nineteenth century preacher C H Spurgeon said something to the effect, “The trouble with many people is that they have just enough Christianity to make them miserable, but not enough to give them joy”. Yes! And isn’t that exactly the worst of both worlds?

I’ve put at the top a couple of New Testament quotes to challenge us about what we might call “true religion”. Perhaps we’ll come back to it next time to find a more positive understanding of what it means to get “faith” and “religion” to merge into one. Please join me.

Dear Father, thank you that I can call you father! Please give me the gift of simple, childlike faith, so that I can know the comfort of trusting day by day in your tender loving care. Amen.